Putting more zip into the zebras

By now you'll know that the animated film Khumba, featuring the voices of Liam Neeson and Laurence Fishburne, was made in Cape Town.

It was in fact gestated and delivered on a farm in Bergvliet, in the Cape. Stepping out of the farmhouse, the home of Triggerfish Animation Studios, for a smoke break, staff often see cows wandering past. So it's not surprising that the film, which turned heads at the recent Toronto Film Festival, is about a zebra who lost his stripes.

One of Triggerfish's five South African partners, accountant Jean Michel Koenig, said the cost savings made possible by the extensive use of the latest technology make it feasible to create films in Cape Town for international distribution.

The average age of the staff who worked on the movie, Koenig said, was 25; that's at least 10 years younger than the average animator working in Hollywood.

"They are inventive and full of fresh ideas," he said.

Of the 100 staff involved in the film, 10 were software developers, producer Mike Buckland said.

These technical staff are brought in to get computers to do repetitive jobs that, if assigned to the creative members of the team, would be a waste of talent.

"Instead of starting from scratch to get each zebra to move developers gave the animators computer tools with which to get groups of zebras moving," Buckland said.

Khumba started production in April 2011.

First there were the ideas, then the drawings to express these ideas. These were then modelled on a computer. Modellers spent up to a week digitally creating each character.

A dedicated team of animators had the technically demanding job of creating the animals' fur.

It's an intense process but what guided the modellers, programmers, artists, animators and composer was the story.

The story is everything. And in this case, the story is the all-important one of Khumba's quest to find his stripes.